WI: KMT win the Chinese Civil War?

Well, I haven't addressed how Chang wins, but-and I honestly don't know this-how close, exactly, did the Nationalists come to catching Mao during the Long March? That, to me, seems like the best moment for Chang-boom, Mao and his top leaders are dead somewhere in the wilderness in 1934, and his army is either dead, captured or thrown into complete disarray.

And also, I'd like to point out that its possible to be mildly pro-Soviet, and even receive support from the Soviets, without actually being a communist. See Nehru, Ataturk during his early rule, Nasser, and many other post-colonial leaders.

They came rather close, but that POD leaves open the problem of him defeating Mao just in time for Imperial Japan to start bitch-slapping him around and then another civil war starts later on when his weaknesses are further revealed. They were already at that time lopping off chunks of China and Jiang never really cared. On his own he's probably worse off.

A post-WWII POD, the most narrow for a GMD victory requires Stalin to stay in China longer, which requires changes to either the European War or the Manhattan Project starting a year later.
 
International relations is actually something I meant to cover in the OP. While Chang might maintain a good relationship with the USSR, he certainly wasn't a communist himself, and I don't think he'd feel nearly as much obligation to communists in other countries as Mao did. So this means, most likely, no Chinese intervention in the Korean war and no Chinese support for the likes of Ho Chi Min, much less Pol Pot. Thus, I don't see North Korea surviving the Korean war. As for Vietnam and the rest of of Indochina, I honestly don't know how much the Viet Minh depended on Maoist support, but I expect the French might have an easier time dealing with them ITTL. Indochina would decolonize around the late 1950's-early 60's like most of the French colonies, and the world will be spared the Khmer Rouge, Shining Path, and other Maoist nuts.
This doesn't follow - the support for North Korea and North Vietnam was not entirely about spreading international communism, there was the issue of simple national interest as well. If Jiang Jieshi's regime survives on the mainland, that means that the communists probably hold Manchuria (as it was the offensive to take the provinces held by Mao in the northeast that broke the KMT's back, as per the OP's source). That means that there would be some sort of Sino-Soviet intervention in Korea. Jiang considered Vietnam to be part of China's sphere of influence, so he would still try to intervene there. Possibly an invasion to install a Viet Quoc puppet regime, which is opposed by the US and France as being a dictatorial front for the communists.
Jiang would also invade Tibet, Xinjiang, etc. sooner or later - those were parts of China under warlord rule, from the Chinese perspective.
Also, I think what happened in Taiwan is a best-case scenario. As much as it pains me, I think the most likely course for China to take in this ATL is something resembling Burma's post-colonial history...
 
Exactly what it says-what if Chang had beaten Mao rather than the other way around?

My first introduction to AH, a book-length collection of academic essays called What If?, had a KMT China as one of the scenarios. However, the author was, it seems, pretty right-wing, and had TTL China follow basically the same development path as OTL Taiwan did (with the justification that since both were ruled by Chang Kai-shek, they both would have turned out the same way), ending with China becoming a democratic first-world nation by the 1990's. I tend to dissagree-Taiwan was, compared to China, a relatively small, urbanized island. Making it into an economic powerhouse was much easier, IMHO, than doing the same 1940's China-land of over a billion people, the majority of them illiterate peasant farmers. Communism actually made some good strides here-particularly with primary education-but at the same time, it bought a good three decades of Autarky and epic fuck-ups like the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Backward. In this, I think, KMT rule will be better by default, since it probably won't try to wipe out its own intelligensia or such. Traditional Chinese culture and religion will probably have more continuity without the Cultural Revolution, and economically it will begin opening up to the US and Europe in the 1950's and 60's instead of the 80's and 90's. But China's sheer size, and low level of infrastructure and education (the last, particularly, is an area where the KMT might be worse than the PRC was), might hinder any democratization movements, and I'd put even money on China remaining an autocratic right-wing dictatorship up to the present.

I've read that Taiwan underwent a lot of development under Japanese rule, that they had compulsory education, the building of public works like railroads and they built up a technically trained workforce. That probably made it easier to Taiwan to become an economic tiger while a Nationalist ruled China wouldn't have those advantages.
 
I've been doing some research about China in this period, a big impression I got that a major part of the Communist's success was that although Mao was better at being a guerilla leader than at running a country, he had some very capable people around him such as Liu, Lin, Zu and above all Zhou. In contrast the KMT didn't seem to have the same scale of talent and as others have said, was riddled with corruption. Perhaps the best outcome for China was for Mao to win the Civil War as IOTL and then die ASAP, Zhou and Liu would have taken over to start the necessary modernisation but there would have been no GLF or Cultural Revolution and Deng would have come to the fore much earlier, then China's explosive economic growth might have started 15-20 years earlier.

As for Chiang, I keep reading about he had planned to deal with corruption and reform land ownership but kept putting it off. It reminds me of Richard II's lament near the end of Skakespeare's eponymous play; "I wasted time, Now time doth waste me..."
 
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